Adam Robinson
http://www.publishinggenius.com
Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he operates Publishing Genius Press. His book of poems, Adam Robison and other poems, will be published by Narrow House Books this year.
Malone and Savoca Week (2): A Conversation with Matthew Savoca
I enjoyed Matthew Savoca’s long poem, Long Love Poem With Descriptive Title, and for Malone and Savoca Week, I interviewed him about it and some novels he’s written. Our talk is almost 3400 words long (edited from ~6,000) and requires no preamble, so let’s get to it. Here is the book cover:
Adam: OK, I want to ask you about Long Love Poem With Descriptive Title. Ready?
Matthew: Yes, let’s do it. I’m drinking a beer.
Adam: Okay, nice. First of all, can I call you the speaker?
Matthew: Yes.
Adam: Oh good. I feel like people make that very complicated.
Matthew: I am definitely the speaker, and I’m not trying to hide it.
Adam: Are you crazy?
Matthew: In what way?
Adam: Well, we should talk first about how much you’ve written.
Matthew: Okay.
Adam: How much have you written? READ MORE >
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September 21st, 2010 / 9:49 am
September 21st, 2010 / 9:49 am
Mike Young’s All Good for Free
Dennis Cooper said (our own) Mike Young’s collection of poetry, We Are All Good if They Try Hard Enough, is an absolute stunner, and that even though they’re just great poems, he “can’t think of a paragraph anywhere that can match them for style or cover their emotional distance.”
One element of the emotionality of Mike’s poems, which is evident from the funny but sincere video I’ve posted below the fold, is his interest in the way humans communicate and miscommunicate. The book’s epigraph is from Martin Buber, after all, and says, “When they sang of what they had thus named, they still meant You.”
I’ll be giving away three copies of Mike’s book. To win one, leave a comment below describing a miscommunication that was funny or ended up with a positive outcome, or just anything about a miscommunication. Mike and I will select three winners based on a complicated set of guidelines this Friday, so please make sure to leave a way I can get in touch with you.
The title poem in Natalie Lyalin’s UDP chapbook, Try a Little Time Travel, is funny. It begins:
Try it a bit, instead of sexing
One night. Close your eyes,And think, Grandmother,
I’m coming to you, live!… (link to purchase)
I like capitalizing the first word in every line in poetry. Some people think it’s old fashioned. It doesn’t mean anything really, I just like it.
All the poems are good. Here’s a bit from another one, where the title is the same as the first line of the poem (a convention I also like, though not as much):
Jesus shows inside his flesh.
He is airy marbles and we are
All looking at his un-pain
Shelf Unbound — “Unbound” being a play on bindings online
Anybody got the skinny on Shelf Unbound?
A few months ago I started receiving press releases from them. They’re a new electronic magazine that promise to “feature the best of small press, university press, and self-published books.” Okay, cool, I was excited that a group I had never heard of was doing something that could be so monumental for indie lit, which is like my main deal. And they’re thinking big, I noted from the first of the three points they said would interest me, which was that they’re offering a free copy of the first issue to the first 10,000 people who request them.
To break that down, the two things that impressed me are READ MORE >
Some Neat
David NeSmith has epublished a new haiku thing, from his El Greed comics. He’s taking comics and haiku off the page. He’s putting wardrobes on the page. I don’t know, you figure it out.
It’s been up for a bit, but Maureen Thorson’s review of Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Film Photo Hallucination Landscape) is so good that I read it and immediately bought the book. Now the book has arrived, and I’m trying to like it as much as I like the review. It’s ambitious in its extratextuality. Its beautiful in its conception. But its wtf in its words. I don’t know, you figure it out.
Gee whiz, here’s an exhaustingive Bookslut interview with Dorothea Lasky.
Karen Lillis on working at St. Marks Bookshop.
Don’t forget: Telephone Journal giveaway ends tomorrow. Leave a comment, win a book.
Phone is ringing, oh my gawd, it’s a giveaway
Telephone is a new journal. Here’s their introduction:
The first issue features poems by Uljana Wolf which are translated by Mary Jo Bang, Christian Hawkey, Susan Bernofsky and more (a damn impressive list; that “more” doesn’t mean “friends of the publisher”). They all translate the same poems, so you can contrast and compare (samples here).
Paul Legault and the editorial crew of Telephone are offering 5 copies of this first issue to htmlgiant readers with a contest. Here’s the game, according to Paul:
I think it would be a good idea to get people to mis/un/dis-translate Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone message:
“Watson, come here! I want to see you!”
And give 5 books to the best five, as judged by the editors.
I take that to mean: translate Bell’s first message any way you want. Do it in Spanish or Klingon or English or whatever. Translation is hip, as Lord Buckley showed Groucho Marx. **UPDATE: Entries must be posted by 12pm Eastern on Friday the 17th.**
And set your cell to vibrate this Friday at their release party:
Time: September 17 · 7:30pm
Place: 177 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY
Freaking NYC man. This looks like a great reading.
What the hell is the world coming to?
I went to a gala of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s tonight, where they performed an exceptional program. I never saw a room of Beethoven-lovers so enchanted by fucked up avant-garde prepared shit. The whole program was amazing. A soprano, mic-less, hummed an aria, wtf. Some world-renown violinist played what I took to be a broken violin. And the first piece struck me as a cooler Philip Glass thing. It was the “Danza Final” by Alberto Ginastera. Never heard of him. I looked it up on Youtube and found it, but this one is done by those things, the squeeze box. Get a load:
Live Giants 7 Re-do: Mairéad Byrne (with ARob and Stephanie)
The live reading will begin at 10 AM Eastern. To watch, please go to the full screen and chatroom broadcast here at uStream. Normally we embed that stuff but it’s like 9am right now so what the heck. Mairéad will take questions in the chatroom and in comments on this thread, so hang out and fire around.
Her latest book, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven is a 208-page collection released by Publishing Genius. Purchases made today get a reduced $10 price and free shipping.
Green Gallery Press Is
In an attic in Riverwest, a Milwaukee neighborhood that is my favorite neighborhood anywhere, brothers John and Joe Riepenhoff founded the Green Gallery. At its start, the gallery was a regular-sized room where they showcased their friends’ work. That was around 2001. Now the Green Gallery has expanded to two buildings, and John is active with art happenings across the globe, with Milwaukee International.
Recently the Green Gallery bros have started putting out books, with their recent offerings: Nicholas Frank’s The Sound of the Horn and Paul Druecke and Claire Readig’s The Last Days of John Budgen, Jr. I read Frank’s short novella in one sitting and loved it. At first I wondered if perhaps the tone was overly-formal, or too “Kafka-esque,” but there aren’t any holes in Frank’s serious prose. It’s a good story (about an accident that results in a car horn that won’t shut off) and it has stayed with me. I recommend grabbing one – if you can find a copy. That isn’t easy because the books are meant to accompany art exhibitions and there’s no web presence (remember that?).
Are these the only two books? Are there more in the pipe? READ MORE >
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August 31st, 2010 / 11:35 am
August 31st, 2010 / 11:35 am